About Kfir Pravda

Posts by Kfir Pravda:

“My CEO sees the marketing department as a presentation factory.”“Management doesn’t approve additional budget for anything besides events.”“Our job is to create collateral for the sales team, nothing more.”“We had amazing PR a couple of months ago, and no one understands the success.”“We need a new website, but management won’t approve it.”“We don’t do social media; our CEO doesn’t believe in it.”

According to BrightFunnel, a company that analyzes funnel performance of enterprise companies such as Cloudera, this number grows every year, as well as the time required to close a deal, and the time it takes a lead to become relevant to sales. This is the reality that we are all facing, and it seems that things are going to get worse. With 76% of B2B marketers planning to create more content in 2016, we will see more leads coming into our pipeline in earlier stages, increasing the need for smart nurturing and insights into the buyer journey. More

Digital marketing is tough. Buyers’ behavior is in constant transition, and in addition to this, LinkedIn, Google and other platforms are constantly changing their algorithms in ways that directly affect your marketing programs. B2B leads are being bombarded by intricate content marketing programs from you and your competitors.

To make matters worse, marketing budgets are not increasing, so to respond to such changes often you need to divert budgets from the tried and tested marketing methods and reallocate money to new digital channels.

In order to make smart decisions you need to be able to measure and analyze your marketing program’s performance. But this is easier said than done. Lack of industry standards, the infancy of measurement platforms, and the complexity of defining and implementing a measurement strategy turns this challenge into a major obstacle in most of the B2B companies that we’ve met. After running more than 100 B2B marketing programs (one of the perks of working with multiple clients), we’ve had our share of mistakes and insights regarding what works and what doesn’t when it comes to B2B marketing and sales measurement.

Here are the key points we recommend for you to consider when measuring your B2B marketing operation. It’s not a definitive guide, but it includes all the key considerations that are not only important, but also timeless. These points will be relevant no matter how marketing tactics change over time. More

Salesforce has become the de facto standard in cloud-based CRM today. With over a million clients worldwide, it’s the safe bet for every CIO/CMO when choosing their next CRM. A CRM platform is critical in tracking and analyzing customer lifecycles. Without it, a company cannot analyze and improve the ways it recruits and retains customers.

Sadly, when it comes to B2B marketing, the whole notion of “demand generation” doesn’t work anymore. Even with the perfect marketing campaign, you’re not going to get a company to buy a product they hadn’t considered in the first place. More

There are always some nice perks when it comes to working with loads of different companies and technologies, in the B2B arena. Besides the pace and the dynamic nature of digital marketing, once in awhile, you feel as if you are part of something – something major. More

The Good Old Days

In the past, marketing was based on amazing creative ideas, delivered via mass media channels to a captured audience.

The Don Drapers of the world would come up with amazing creative concepts on how to position products and services. These ideas were then pushed through mass media channels, such as TV and newspapers, to us – the consumers. We had no choice. TV shows were interrupted by commercials showing the benefits of smoking. Newspapers were filled with ads trying to convince us that if we buy that car we will also become attractive enough to win over the beautiful woman that is lying on it in a seductive pose. So basically, after they came up with a cool idea, admen could relax and have a drink.

One of the first things we ask when assessing a client’s digital marketing situation is what’s the size of its email database. The reason is simple – email marketing is still a viable marketing channel. Not only that, but it could also be used as an ad targeting tool in platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

However, the size of the database could be misleading, as size in this case doesn’t really matter. Engagement does. More

…The primary problem with the funnel is that the buying process is no longer linear. Prospects don’t just enter at the top of the funnel; instead, they come in at any stage. Furthermore, they often jump stages, stay in a stage indefinitely, or move back and forth between them….